Here’s something we didn’t expect: on Monday, Ambassador David Friedman met with representatives of J Street, including the group’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami and seven Democratic congressmen, in Tel Aviv, Ha’aretz reported.
J Street released a statement following the meeting, which was closed to the media, saying: “We value Ambassador Friedman’s willingness to meet with Congressmen as part of the pro-Israel lobby J Street. We believe it is vital to keep an open line of communication between Jewish American and Israeli leaders with different political backgrounds.”
The group added that the meeting “symbolizes the will and desire to maintain a dialogue among the pro-Israel community, even with those that do not agree with J Street.”
They also stressed “the urgent need to advance the two-state solution.”
Friedman’s nomination to serve as US Ambassador was challenged by leftwing Jews close to J Street and beyond, who quoted his articles on the Arutz 7 website, which were extremely, even brutally critical of Ben-Ami et al: “Are J Street supporters really as bad as kapos?” Friedman asked in one opinion piece, and said that “the answer, actually, is no. They are far worse than kapos – Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas – it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.”
Last February, facing a serious challenge to his nomination from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who are allergic to comparisons to things Holocaust, coming from the right or the left, Friedman bowed down and kissed the PC ring: “I regret use of such language,” he said, promising that his “inflammatory rhetoric during the presidential campaign is entirely over. If confirmed, my language would be measured.”
His boss would never have taken anything back, that’s for sure. Now Friedman had to show that he meant what he said, hosting as he did the very people who work tirelessly to erase the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. Or, as an embassy source put it Monday: “Ambassador Friedman committed to meeting with all the Jewish organizations in the US and he is standing by his word.”
Last week, Friedman beat his breast during a public speech, declaring: “I am as guilty as anyone else for having entered the partisan divide that has, unfortunately, to some extent fractured the Jewish community in the US and in Israel. But it has to end.”
Say it ain’t so, Mr. Friedman, say it ain’t so.